Cases & Investigations

Restasis Antitrust Lawsuit

COURT: United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York

Berger Montague represents a proposed class of direct purchasers of the drug Restasis.

Plaintiffs allege that Allergan committed a series of anticompetitive acts designed to delay competition in the market for its blockbuster ophthalmic drug Restasis (cyclosporine emulsion), including fraudulently obtaining patents from the Patent & Trademark Office, fraudulently listing those patents with the FDA, entering into sham patent lawsuits against potential generic competitors, filing repeated meritless citizen petitions with the FDA designed to slow approval of the generic competitors, and fraudulently transferring the patents to the Mohawk Tribe as a means of preventing legal challenges to the validity of the patents. The result of Allergan’s scheme was that prices for Restasis (cyclosporine emulsion) were higher than they otherwise would have been.

Plaintiffs filed their amended complaints on December 11, 2017 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The case was then transferred to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and Allergan moved to dismiss the complaints on April 27, 2018. Briefing is not yet complete on the motion.